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Anonymous musician heads to the front lines. The majority of the front lines are personed by youth.

Santiago: where militancy, music and art meet.

Copy and all photographs by Orin Langelle

Protesters tear up the sidewalk to make projectiles for later street fight with the Carabineros (national police)

Santiago, Chile – Last night, 13 December, thousands of people took to the streets lengthening the almost daily protest to almost two months. Plaza de la Dignidad was filled and overflowing down side streets in what was reportedly one of the biggest turnouts to date in the mobilization. It appears unless the government backs down and organizes a constitutional assembly, the protests promise to keep going.

Tactic diversity, including property destruction, is an accepted part of the struggle, unlike in the U.S. where taking the streets without a permit is often frowned upon. Things are more real here, people do not have the false expectation that there is a future under capitalism or that the young generation will survive the climate catastrophe certain under business as usual.

Person with slingshot fires at the teargas defended Catholic Church where the Carabineros are said to go to mass to confess their sins and receive absolution. Person in foreground is suffering from the teargas.

In Chile and elsewhere in Latin America the Catholic Church for the most part, except under Liberation Theology, has sided with the wealthy colonizers that have taken away land from the Indigenous Peoples and profited handsomely.

Tear gas canisters fired in the crowd are picked up and extinguished in a solution, as seen in the above bottle

Breaking up the sidewalk of the Alemada to make projectiles

Crowne Plaza Santiago.

The hotel boasts, “Everything revolves around business, almost. At Crowne Plaza® Hotels & Resorts, life does not stop when business starts. We want you to enjoy everything: increase your productivity, recharge and feel inspired to minimize your downtime and improve your performance. Sometimes, a mojito is as important as a meeting.” But in Santiago people feel a molotov cocktail (or brick) is what is needed to improve the performance of the protests. Santiago’s Crowne Plaza is shut. The tourist industry in Chile has taken a beating due to the uprising.

This metal street light was toppled onto La Alameda moments earlier and used as one of the street blockades. A young person uses it as a tight rope.

Art is always present in the protests

In the city almost every wall is a canvas covered with grafitti and other art

Young person in training

How the government plans in the future to deal with the uprising is unclear except for the ongoing violence used against the people. So far they have used rape, murder, torture, shotgun blasts to the face with rubber coated plastic pellets that taken upwards of 350+ eyes, tear gas and water cannons.

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In Chile where COP25 was cancelled due to the people’s rebellion, and where so many have lost their eyes, here is what we think the logo of COP25 should really look like:

The symbol of the bleeding eye is omnipresent in street art and graffiti throughout Chile

Photojournalist Orin Langelle takes a break by graffiti celebrating Victor Jara in Santiago, Chile. Langelle has been photographing the frontlines of the peoples rebellion in Chile. The musician Jara, a Chilean hero, was murdered by the regime of dictator Augusto Pinochet. photo: Petermann/GJEP

PLEASE FOLLOW GLOBAL JUSTICE ECOLOGY PROJECT & THE BIOFUELWATCH TEAM IN CHILE:

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Photo: Claudio Nogueira

The Role of Eucalyptus in Brazil comes under the Crosshairs of the International Anti-Transgenic Tree Network (June 2, 2023)

Impact of monoculture in territories was the subject of visits led by FASE in Espírito Santo

 

Note: FASE were co-organizers of the tour to the communities of Espírito Santo.

The article (included below in full) is written by Claudio Nogueira (FASE Communications Coordinator) and originally appeared June 2nd, 2023, on FASE’s website. It is available in both Portugese and English through Google Translate.

 

The pulp industry writes a sad story in Brazil. Its role in land occupation with eucalyptus monoculture imprints a perverse logic that suffocates traditional communities and goes far beyond false ideas of reforestation and environmental concern. This was the scenario encountered by members of the campaign “Stop GM Trees” (No to Transgenic Trees) and the Alert Against Green Deserts Network, in a tour organized by the FASE Espírito Santo team, visiting locations in the north of Espírito Santo and the extreme south in Bahia, between the 24th and 29th of May.

In all, around 25 people, including popular educators, quilombola and landless leaders, environmentalists and foreign researchers from Canada, the USA, New Zealand, Japan, Germany, Ireland, Argentina and Chile were able to verify the impact of eucalyptus plantations on the way of life of family farmers and traditional communities in the region. For three days, the group got to know the experiences of agroecological practices in areas taken over by the Landless Workers Movement (MST) at the Egídio Brunetto Training School and at the Índio Galdino settlement, in addition to hearing reports of the difficulties faced by the quilombola communities of Volta Miúda and Angelim 2 with monoculture plantations. After the visits,

eucalyptus espirito santo

Photo: Claudio Nogueira

For Beto Loureiro, educator at FASE in Espírito Santo, the tour was important for the researchers to realize that the impacts are already terrible, and the transgenic trees are going to be one more aggression in the historical series that monoculture causes in the territories, “since the expulsion of traditional communities, passing through the depletion of water resources and the enormous amount of poisons that they apply now, even by air”. “They are spraying the monocultures by drone, and this poison is spreading, falling on the communities’ plantations, falling on their homes, on their schools. In short, a real chemical war, which takes place here in the green desert, ”he explains.

Transgenic trees, a new threat

Brazil was chosen to host the meeting due to the extension of activities in the paper industry and approval by the company Suzano, in 2021, for the planting of genetically modified eucalyptus trees to tolerate the herbicide glyphosate. This follows the previous approval, in 2015, of FuturaGene’s fast-growing transgenic eucalyptus tree, which was not planted commercially. The country is the only one in Latin America where field tests seem to be taking place today with genetically modified trees.

Genetic engineering directly changes the genetic makeup (DNA) of an organism, bypassing normal plant or animal reproduction to create new traits. Genetic engineering includes techniques that make changes to DNA by inserting genetic material from the same, similar or wholly unrelated organisms, or, with genome editing (also called gene editing), by introducing genetic material that acts as “editor” to change the DNA. Genetic engineering applied to trees is a technical challenge fraught with serious environmental and social risks.

Photo: Claudio Nogueira

Most research is focused on increasing the productivity of planted trees for various industrial purposes. These objectives include pulp, paper and wood production; as well as the use of trees as “bioenergy” crops – to produce biomass and liquid “cellulosic biofuel”. There is also some interest in genetically modifying trees to produce other industrial materials such as pharmaceuticals, using the trees as “biofactories”, as well as experiments to sell carbon credits and proposals to release these trees into the wild to “restor” endangered species. of extinction.

“It made us realize that it is another problem that we will have to deal with”, ponders Beto. “These transgenic eucalyptus trees grow very quickly. Therefore, they must also suck water very quickly, they are resistant to poisons. We can imagine that the burden of poisons in monocultures will increase, and that is what we expect from these researchers: that they return to their countries also understanding that non-transgenic eucalyptus is already a tragedy”, he concludes.

The foreign delegation continued its tour of Brazil with audiences at UnB and Esplanada dos Ministérios, in Brasília, and will continue to Mato Grosso do Sul, also to verify the role of eucalyptus plantations in the environmental imbalance in the state.